Seattle’s Socialist Money Laughs at the Idea of the ‘Rich’ Leaving. But Who Will Pay the Bills?

Seattle’s new socialist mayor is in the process of being mugged by reality and her response is to say that it’s, like, no big deal. Tee hee!

In a recently surfaced video from an event at Seattle University, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson—the West Coast Zohran Mamdani—was asked if Washington State’s new taxes are a good thing for the tax climate in her city. The state recently passed a “millionaire tax” along with several other significant tax increases.

This means that Seattle now has the highest state and local tax burden for high-income earners in the country.

Wilson’s response was the equivalent of that meme of a dog in a burning building saying, “This is fine.”

“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if—the ones that leave, like, bye,” Wilson said.

This genius reasoning was met with thunderous applause, of course. And by genius, I mean completely moronic.

Socialists like Wilson and Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, have based the foundation of their socialist program on the idea that the magical geese that lay the golden eggs—the “rich”—are going to pay for it all.

How exactly does that work if the geese go away to lay eggs for someone else?

Wilson admitted later in the interview that the taxes may cause some problems for the city, but she shrugged them off.

Wilson’s sentiment does seem to be common on the left. They create policies that drive people away, declare some kind of victory that their enemies are leaving, then, at some point, desperately try to get them to come back. Somehow, their ideas always lead to a Berlin Wall to keep people in rather than out.

New York’s Democrat governor, Kathy Hochul, had a similar message to Wilson’s until she started to figure out the downside of the “neener, neener, get lost!” approach to governance.

Years ago, Hochul told New Yorkers who weren’t happy with the leftist direction of the state’s policies, “Get out of here. We don’t need you.”

It turns out she did need them.

In March, Hochul admitted that New York’s dwindling tax base was creating a fiscal crisis for the state. She begged wealthy former residents who had fled to red states like Florida to come home to be taxed.

What a compelling message. At least Hochul is beginning to understand the basic math problem she and her fellow Democrats have created.

I suspect Mamdani simply believes that New York City is too big to fail, that the draw of the Big Apple will compel businesses and the wealthy to stay no matter how bad things get. There may be some truth to that, but the financial calamity Mamdani and his only slightly less spendthrift predecessors have created is one that even New York can’t sustain. Productive people are leaving, the coffers are tapped out, and the expensive programs are multiplying.

Seattle and the state of Washington look to be in even more dire straits than New York, if that can be believed. The state faces a massive, multibillion-dollar budget deficit. And this is after some of the considerable tax increases kicked in. Seattle faces a large budget deficit, too, and the hits will keep on coming.

One of Wilson’s first acts after Seattle elected her mayor was to call for a boycott of Starbucks, which was her way of showing solidarity with striking baristas. You won’t believe what happened next.

Starbucks, the famed Seattle brand, effectively pulled up stakes and announced in April that it would make a massive expansion to its Nashville corporate office. The Seattle HQ would stay where it is, but is clearly being bypassed for the new growth.

As Fox Business reported, the move means that Seattle “could lose up to $750 million in tax revenue in the coming years.”

When asked about this problem by a reporter, the seemingly blindsided Wilson hemmed and hawed about the Nashville move being in the works “for years” before being spirited away by a staffer.

The reason this move has been in the works for a while is because of the punitive Washington state tax increases that are only getting worse.

Ryan Frost, a tax policy analyst at the Washington Policy Center, wrote in City Journal about how Washington and Seattle are driving out “wealth creators.”

“The Association of Washington Business’s quarterly survey shows 44 percent of Washington business leaders are considering moving their personal residence out of state,” Frost wrote. “The share planning to move their businesses out of state has nearly doubled in a year, from 9% to 17%. State population data show net migration falling by 7,500 people year over year, with domestic in-migration down 18% relative to pre-pandemic levels. Those leaving are disproportionately high-income earners.”

This is a classic blue state doom loop.

It’s so bad in Washington that even Nick Hanauer, the leftist venture capitalist who supported the state’s tax the rich schemes, whined about how they are driving the wealthy entirely out of the state.

“Virtually every wealthy friend I have has either left or is planning to,” Hanauer said recently. “It’s a catastrophe.”

I’m not going to cry for Hanauer. Serves him right. But it couldn’t be clearer that Wilson and her Democrat allies in the state capitol have created a huge mess they have no plan to fix. The spending won’t stop. Instead, the financial burden will simply fall on the middle class, which is also fleeing the state.

Who could have guessed that a 43-year-old socialist community organizer living off the charity of her parents hasn’t got a clue of how to turn things around in the Emerald City?